More music picks for your Monday. If you like what you hear, use the links provided to snag it for yourself from Amazon. Doing so through us gives us kickbacks, and those help pay for stuff like more bandwidth. And also so we can buy more music.
Alice in Chains was a band that I enjoyed after picking up Dirt in the wake of digging the absolute shit out of “Would?” from the Singles soundtrack. And then I enjoyed the hell out of it…and to a certain extent everything that came after…especially their “Let’s try something slightly different” EPs like Jar of Flies and Sap. And then as they fell apart during and after the loss of vocalist Layne Staley, I sort of lost touch. Seemed like whenever I caught them, there was something about it that just wasn’t…them. But now, having heard the new single “Stone” from the upcoming The Devil Put Dinosaurs Here, I feel like I’m getting a suitable successor to Staley and yet the band just isn’t Alice in Chains Again. And while trying to find a live performance of “Stone,” I stumbled across this: and thus, witness William DuVall nailing the shit out of “Kashmir,” back by the rest of AIC and a freaking orchestra, recorded in 2009 (I think).
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Dinosaurs hits next week. And the AIC official site is here. (Amazon: CD; Vinyl.)
There’s not much to say about this live, acoustic version of “Hey Love” by Quadron. Coco, the vocalist front and center, is apparently getting a lot of play from being on the Great Gatsby soundtrack. However, this…this is just so smooth. The album Avalanche is due out on June 4th and the regular “Hey Love” single is currently available as an MP3. (Amazon: Avalanche CD; Vinyl.)
The Quadron official site can be found here.
Thanks to Rob, I’ve been turned on to Big Black Delta. And if the name indeed comes from Dan Aykroyd (as the sample which opens this song might suggest), then they get double word score. This is one of the best music videos I’ve ever posted on here…but don’t ask me to tell you why. This is “IFUCKINGLOVEYOU” from their self-titled debut, which hit at the end of April. It’s currently available on MP3 for just $5.99…and I can’t stop listening to it. So there. (Amazon: CD; MP3; Vinyl.)
The official site is here where they’re bribing you to sign up for their newsletter with a free download of this very song. Nice.
Give a shout-out to John Bonham, who is American Opera, originally hailing from Michigan and now in New York City. This infectiously fun track is “Broken Roads,” from his new EP. It hits July 2nd and it’s called Your Songs. For fifteen different ways of connecting with John, check out his official site.
Sometimes you just need some unassuming, straight up rock-fun. Submitted for your perusal: Mike Colin, out of Denver. His new album, Crystal Cage will be impacting on May 28th and available at all good internet emporia. Here’s “Stepping Stones.” And once that’s done, he’s got a bunch of B-sides posted at his Bandcamp site. Tell him we said hi.
Next we have Anouk, out of The Netherlands. And if you think that the string content of this track, “Are You Lonely,” completely suckered me in…well, you’re exactly correct. This is from Sad Singalong Songs, which just hit last week. (Amazon: MP3.)
Anouk’s official site is here.
Jeremy Malvin is Chrome Sparks, and with this track, “Cosmic Claps of Love,” it’s like the missing soundtrack to an Atari game based on the work of Syd Mead. No, not a 2600…no, I’m talking the cutting edge 5200. Yeah. Anyway, the Sparks EP is available from Bandcamp with a name-your-price setup. It’s all tasty.
And last but not least, since Scandinavia seems to be ruling a lot of my ear-time these days, we close out with Kissaway Trail. From Denmark, they give me that wall of sound thing that I’m clued into, with a vocalist seemingly trapped inside the wall but the instruments sounding like mild industrial equipment trying to chisel them out without actually harming them. I’m sure it sounds the same way to you. But regardless, that’s one of my favorite sounds and my therapist can’t explain it either. This is the track “Nørrebro” from the upcoming EP, Life is a B-Side out next week. And then look for their full-on album, Breach, hitting August 20th. For more info, their official site is here.
Nørrebro by Kissaway Trail out of Denmark from the Life is a B-side EP
